FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT ILLINOIS SUPREME COURT - PAGE 4

The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday ordered a new trial for Verneal Jimerson, who was sentenced to death for a 1978 murder in the Chicago area. A young couple were abducted during a service-station robbery near Homewood. Their bodies were found later in East Chicago Heights. Several people were prosecuted for the crimes, but the only evidence linking Jimerson to the events was testimony from another defendant. The Supreme Court had approved his conviction and sentence in 1989, but Jimerson filed another appeal.

The homeowners associations responsible for managing subdivisions across the state have the power to enforce their own traffic rules through a private security force, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Friday, overturning a lower-court ruling that found they could be unlawful. Former DuPage County prosecutor Ken Poris sued LaSalle County's Lake Holiday Property Owners Association after he was pulled over for speeding in 2008 by a vehicle with flashing lights. A uniformed officer wearing a badge and duty belt took his driver's license and Lake Holiday membership card back to his squad car and wrote him a $50 speeding ticket.

The Illinois Supreme Court has announced tough new rules that will limit the amount of compensation paid state judges who hold part-time teaching jobs at law schools or other institutions. Under the new rules, judges will not be allowed to accept more than $2,000 in any six-month period for teaching or lecturing and can teach only after regular business hours. Judges also must receive written permission from their supervising judges that classroom activities will not interfere with their judicial duties.

Former Illinois Supreme Court Justice Moses Harrison was a longtime foe of the death penalty. During his tenure as chief justice of the state high court, he appeared on the TV news show "60 Minutes" with Mike Wallace to discuss the state's death penalty, which Illinois lawmakers eliminated in 2011. He also appeared in the movie "Too Flawed to Fix: The Illinois Death Penalty Experience. " Mr. Harrison wrote in a dissenting opinion in a late 1990s death penalty case that "the execution of an innocent person is inevitable" and that "despite the courts' efforts to fashion a death penalty scheme that is just, fair and reliable, the system is not working.

John L. Nickels capped a distinguished legal career with six years on the Illinois Supreme Court bench in the 1990s. A Republican from rural Kane County, Justice Nickels wrote 95 majority opinions, including one later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down Chicago's gang loitering ordinance. He also wrote an opinion concurring with a majority ruling of the court in 1994 to overturn the conviction and death sentence of Rolando Cruz for the murder of Jeanine Nicarico, of Naperville.

In a decision that could result in more home-based child day-care services across the state, the Illinois Supreme Court Thursday upheld lower court rulings prohibiting Olympia Fields from refusing to allow a village resident to offer child-care services in her home. The state's highest court said the circuit and state appellate courts correctly ruled that non-home-rule municipalities may not use zoning laws or other legal restrictions to stop state-licensed residents from operating a day care in their homes.

Voters in the March primary get a chance to begin shaping the Illinois Supreme Court that will confront questions of law and justice to the edge of the next century. But the issues in Cook County, where critical election contests are taking place, are firmly planted in the 1980s-race, gender and name recognition. This is an important election for the state high court, which is undergoing its biggest change in 14 years. There will be three new justices elected to 10-year terms on the seven-member court when it convenes next January.

Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois filed separate lawsuits Wednesday challenging the constitutionality of the Illinois law that denies gay men and women the right to marry. There is little doubt among constitutional experts that the challenged law is unconstitutional. The central question is whether our Illinois judges will have the courage to say so. More than most Americans today realize, throughout much of our history gay men and women have been branded as criminals, sexual psychopaths and perverts.

When Mary Ann McMorrow was a Cook County assistant state's attorney in the 1950s, a supervisor told her that a male colleague would argue the points in a legal brief she had prepared for the Illinois Supreme Court. Women just didn't go in front of such high-ranking judges, the male supervisor said. But she didn't let the setback stop her. She would go on to break gender barriers throughout her career, including serving as the first woman on the Illinois Supreme Court and its first female chief justice.

By Joseph L. Hoffmann. The author is a professor at the Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington, Ind | December 1, 2002

The death penalty system in Illinois is widely perceived to be broken, and Gov. George Ryan and the Illinois legislature are now trying to fix it. One of the proposals on the table is the "Fundamental Justice Amendment," sponsored by Sen. Peter Roskam (R.-Wheaton) with the support of senators from both political parties. The amendment to the statute governing the Illinois Supreme Court, which I helped to draft and which is likely to be considered by the Senate on Dec. 3, would make the death penalty in Illinois more reliable and worthier of public confidence.